The Last Kestrel

A young boy, weighed down by a bulging bag, came running towards her. He stuck to her side, brandishing a plastic bottle of juice. He pushed it in her face, urging her to buy. She swatted him away. Across the road, a group of young men skidded to a halt on motorbikes, kicking up dust. They wore dark glasses and faded foreign T-shirts, cotton scarves tied loosely round their necks. They were whooping and showing off. They called out insults to a passing group of mothers and daughters. The young women pulled their scarves more closely round their faces. Hasina hesitated.

A sudden movement caught her eye, down beyond the market, towards Nayullah. There were men in the road, waving their arms and flagging down vehicles. The sun glinted on metal at their chests. She screened her eyes to look. Guns.

They were Afghans, not foreigners. They wore shabby uniforms, bunched in folds at the waist. There was a barrier in the road. They were stopping passing vehicles, forcing them to pull in to the side and be searched. At that moment, a motorbike came roaring through, two young men clinging to the seat. Behind it a battered pickup truck, open at the back like a farmer’s vehicle, was forced to a halt. Were the men in uniform asking the drivers for money? Who were they? She frowned. This was something new. It unsettled her.

She turned in from the street and picked her way down the narrow mud aisles between the stalls. The clamour flowed over her. Last time she was here, she’d bought boots for Aref. He’d be wearing those boots now. She looked round, trying to get her bearings. The second-hand shoe stall had gone. Everything looked different. The stalls seemed brasher, the shouting stallholders more aggressive. Other shoppers barged and jostled her, as some pressed their way forward, others forced their way past. Every time someone stopped to examine the goods, crouching down to turn over in their hands a plastic sandal or cotton scarf, they became a rock in the stream, damming up the crowd behind them.

Hasina began to feel light-headed with the noise, the heat and her lack of sleep. Through the crowd, she saw a face she recognized. A fruit-seller. An old man from a village near town. She pushed her way towards him.

‘May Allah bless and protect you,’ she said to him. ‘And all your family.’

‘And may He also bless and protect yours.’ He got to his feet, pushed his toes into his sandals. His cap was dusty. He moved to the side, clearing a small space at the side of his stall so she could step in from the thoroughfare.

‘So busy today,’ she said. She wiped her face with her shawl.

‘Yes, so many people.’ He gestured to her to sit, then turned from her to his goods. He had arranged a display of oranges in a carefully balanced pyramid, small misshapen pieces of fruit, picked too early in the season. He spent time choosing one, then sliced it open over the earth with his knife and handed her a piece to suck. The sweetness of the juice made her heady. He settled down, cross-legged, beside her, and smiled as he watched her eat, showing, through his grey beard, black stumps of teeth.

She sucked on the orange, pulling her scarf forward round her face. In front of them, the crowd streamed past. ‘How is business?’

The old man spread his hands. Hasina saw the bulging veins running along their backs. ‘Like this, like that,’ he said. ‘When the rains come, then it will be better.’

‘Yes, let’s pray for rain soon.’

They nodded. The fat man at the next stall began to shout through a loud-hailer, urging passers-by to stop and look. The rich smell of the orange cut into the stale sweat all around her.

‘I’ve never seen so many vehicles,’ she said.

The old man scowled. ‘And those new police, you saw them?’ He wagged his finger at her. ‘Thugs. The foreigners give them guns.’

Hasina felt the orange thicken in her throat. The policemen’s guns must be good then. Better than the country-made weapons of the fighters. She threw the orange peel behind her onto the ground, wiped her sticky fingers on her scarf.

‘So much trouble.’ She looked round. No one was close enough to hear. ‘More killing in town, I hear.’

The old man raised his hands to the sky. ‘Every day.’

They sat with their heads close, whispering in each other’s ears in the midst of the hubbub, as if they were sheltering together under a tree in a violent storm.

‘The foreign soldiers have built a camp in the desert,’ he said. ‘Just a few miles outside Nayullah. They’re trying to shake out all the…’ He paused, hesitating as he chose his word. ‘…the fighters.’

She nodded. ‘I heard.’

‘Every day they drive through the streets, big guns pointing everywhere, shouting at us all.’ He shook his head. ‘The children throw stones. Everyone’s afraid.’ He coughed, spat to the side.

‘First the Russians, now the Americans,’ Hasina said. ‘When will they leave us in peace?’

The old man tutted agreement. ‘Today, even people from town have walked out here.’ He paused, gestured about him with an outstretched arm. ‘People are frightened to go to market in town in case the foreigners come. How many are being killed?’ He lowered his voice to a murmur. ‘Killed or just disappeared.’

Hasina closed her eyes. She felt the ground beneath her sway and put her hand to her face. Her fingers, close to her nose, stank of orange. When she opened her eyes again, the old man was looking at her with concern.

She swallowed hard. ‘Will we ever see peace?’

‘We chased off the Russians. But it cost a lot of blood.’ He paused, looked away into the blur of the crowd. ‘All the bombing. My old body doesn’t matter. But the young people, the children…’ He sighed.

A passer-by stopped to examine the oranges. The old man got to his feet and invited him to taste one. The man walked on without speaking. The old man settled back. ‘These people,’ he said. ‘No manners.’

His expression suddenly lightened as he remembered something. He reached in his pocket to pull out a grimy photograph. A cheap studio portrait, creased with wear. It showed a couple, uncomfortable in new clothes, posing stiffly with an infant. ‘See,’ he said. His face shone with pride. ‘I have a grandson now. Finally! After so many years of just girls. Praise be to Allah!’

‘What a blessing,’ she said. ‘I’ll pray he grows up safe and healthy.’

She got to her feet.

‘Pray he grows up safe,’ he whispered. ‘And not speaking American.’

She bought spices and, at a hardware stall, bargained for a stout cooking pot. She started back along the road. The cries from the market stalls were garish in her ears. Her hand steadied the pot on her head. The young boy, hawking his local juice, ran up again as soon as he saw her, pushing the bottles in her face. She fended him off with her free hand.

‘Have you no manners?’ she said. The boy paused, backed off a little. ‘Weren’t you taught to show respect?’ He took a step towards her again. ‘Well, weren’t you?’

She was punched in the back of the head. Struck hard. Pitched forward. Knocked down. A deep, resonant boom. Powerful as thunder. Her bones vibrated with it. Her face smacked into the ground. Deafened. Dust filled her eyes. Her mouth. A wave of sickness. Her limbs were shaking, drumming the ground in spasms. She blinked frantically, trying to see. She managed to lift her head. The broken shards of the pot were rocking from side to side in the road.

She lay still. She must breathe. The world must settle into place again. Alive. Praise Allah. She was alive. She closed her eyes. She was sinking. Her limbs were like stones. Still and heavy, held by the ground. She tried again to lift her head, to open her eyes. She was breathing now. The air stank. Petrol. Burning cloth. A stench of singed meat. Her stomach was convulsing. Around her, a blur of fast-moving shapes. People were running. Arms were waving in and out of clouds of dust. She could hear nothing. Was she dying? No. A pop. She was bursting up from the bottom of a well. Raw sound broke into her ears. Screaming. Men shouting. Feet beating on the road.

The soft tang of fruit pulp broke near her face. Rivulets of juice running in the dust. Bubbling as it sank into the ground, turning it to mud. The small boy. His bottles. Burst. She sensed him scrambling to his feet beside her. He peered into her face. His brown eyes wide with terror. A sweet boy. Like Aref. She shouldn’t have scolded. He was staring past her, back down the road, towards the market. Something there. What? She eased her head from the ground. Twisted her neck. Black smoke hung, thick and oily. A tall orange flame. A flame dirty with smoke, bent like a person staggering. She let her face fall back to the dust. Exhausted. Someone was tugging at her. A frightened voice in her ear. ‘Get up, Auntie. Get up.’ The boy.

Finally she managed to sit. She was in the road. In the way. People were crying. Hugging children. A man, running, stepped on her hand. His arms were brimming with shoes, snatched up from somewhere. A plastic sandal fell in the dirt beside her. Green. Shiny. How stupid, she thought. To steal an odd shoe.

The boy had run towards the smoke. Now he came running back. His face was contorted. He knelt in the dirt, took hold of her shoulders and shook them.

‘Get up.’ He seemed ready to cry. Why didn’t he leave her be? He was pulling on her arms. She got onto her knees, then to her feet. She stood uncertainly. Swaying. Her scarf was in folds at her neck, her head exposed. She lifted it back into place. She felt sick. Her head was dizzy with fumes, with noise. Maybe she should sink down and sit again. The boy, pulling at her, was agitated.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What now?’

He lifted his hand and pointed down the road to the wreckage. ‘The policemen,’ he said. ‘Look!’

She tried out her legs. They were shaking. She took a step. The boy buzzed about in front of her. She was intact. She was alive. He seized her hand and pulled her forward, down the road.

A ring of people had formed. A tight crowd. Men stood, silent with shock. Others draped their arms round shoulders and craned forward to see. Their arms and heads were blocking her view. The boy had crouched to look through the legs. She sank down beside him. The flame was burning quietly in a sheath of smoke. It was thin and dying, rising from a greasy heap of twisted metal. The fumes filled her mouth. The air was shuddering with its heat.

She twisted to see through the gaps. She could make out the mangled remains of vehicles. She couldn’t tell how many. Too many blackened parts. Many were blown some distance. They smouldered where they lay. Scattered fragments of metal, of glass, covered the surface of the road. Dark pools of oil, others of blood, stained the dust. Splashes of black and deep red against brown.

She sat heavily. The boy was pulling at her sleeve, pointing. She couldn’t look. The heat of the fire, the press of the men, was making her giddy. She tasted bile and tried to swallow it back. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘I’m sick,’ she said. No one was listening.

The boy was still tugging. She lifted her head. Through the legs and the shifting smoke, she made out figures slumped along the road. A policeman, his torso drenched in blood. On his side. A woman, her hair blackened with soot. Sitting. Bent over the shape of a child stretched across her lap. A man, staggering, his hands grasping the air. A boy, staring about him in confusion. A police radio, abandoned on the ground, suddenly sparked into life, pumping out voices from far away. She covered her eyes with her hands. Too much. How could this happen? The fading smell of orange was still on her fingers. Dizziness enfolded her in waves. She lowered her head to her lap.

The sounds swelled and faded and swelled again in her ears. She sat. She had to get home. How would she get home? She shifted her feet. The soles of her sandals stuck to the filth in the road. Two men beside her were talking in low voices. She opened her eyes, looked up at them. Their faces swam.

‘What happened?’ She didn’t bother with the customary greetings.

‘Bombs,’ said one of the men. ‘Maybe two.’ He gestured towards the debris. ‘Suicide bombers.’

‘Who?’ She had clasped his leg, digging her nails into his cotton trousers. ‘Who did it?’

He leaned back from her, his face closing. ‘Who knows?’

Aref. Could he be…? She crawled frantically into the crowd. Pushing herself forward through the legs like a dog. A young man barred her way with his foot. She knocked it away. She was nearing the front. Voices above. Men moved aside for her. Now the heat from the fire was scorching. She blinked, stared in disbelief. The horror. Soot-blackened corpses. Hair burned. Flesh swollen and bubbling as it cooked. A single arm, severed. Lying with its knuckles to the ground, fingers curling. Half a man’s body. A pair of trousers still clinging, drenched with blood, to the legs. She moaned. She couldn’t look. Her elbows gave way. Her face fell to the dirt. She was shaking too much to move.

Her mind was bursting. Images seared her eyes. Her throat burned with acid. Abdul. I must reach Abdul. She was sobbing, rocking herself. It wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. Allah, in His mercy, would never allow it. Such wickedness. Such mutilation. She started to wail. A strangled sound. High-pitched with pain. She had seen another thing. Too terrifying to bear. Limp on the ground, blackened and pockmarked, a brass talisman. Still threaded on a scrap of leather. In the shape of a bird with its wings spread and claws outstretched.

A man was dragging her away, scolding her. The boy’s face was in hers, hovering with big eyes. The crowd around her was being broken up. A thickset man seized hold of her shoulders and propelled her forward, away from the flames, the bodies. He was stern-faced. Get away, he kept saying. Go home. The foreign soldiers are coming. Go! A mess of people tugged at her.

She didn’t know how she got home. She had a sense of running, stumbling, arms outstretched. Calling Abdul. Aref. She made it just inside the hut, then collapsed on the ground in the cool darkness. She flattened her palms against the mud, clinging to it. The earth was spinning out of control. Her stomach turned. Her body, exhausted, ached. She banged the flat of her hands against the ground. She dug her fingernails into the earth, scraping them along the smooth earth, and howled. Her eyes were already blind with weeping.

As she lay there, pounding the floor with her hands, all she could hear were the voices. A pitiful voice which refused to believe it. Maybe he’s safe. Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he said No and left them. Even as her mind tried to think this, a second voice was louder, tolling like a bell, saying: it’s over, it’s over, my boy, my Aref, he’s gone. The smell of burning flesh seemed to cling to her.

Her face was flattened against the mud. Cool against her cheek. Darkness. After some time, she didn’t know how long, she heard shuffling and whispering. A very ordinary noise. It seemed to drift down to her from across a vast divide. She lay still, trying to block it out. The noise grew louder.

A small hand brushed against her hair, tentative at first and soft, then a little firmer as it stroked. Another hand patted her back, light rhythmical taps, the way a child might bounce a ball. She let herself sob a little more, leaking tears and mucus into the wet mud round her face. The hands paused, stopped. There was whispering. She tried to ignore it, to shut out the world, to focus on her grief, her pain. After a few minutes, the hands started again to pat, to stroke.

Something landed on the mud beside her head, smooth skin rubbing up against her temple, nuzzling her. She lifted her head a fraction and opened her eyes. A pair of clear brown eyes were an inch or two from her face, full of worry and puzzlement.

‘Hasina Auntie?’ Sima asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

She closed her eyes again, let her head fall back to the wet mud. She could sense the other children as well. That must be Nadira who was patting her back and crooning nonsense in a low voice, as if she were soothing a favourite doll. Hasina could hear Yousaf too. He was out in the back, perhaps, talking to the goats, petting them and setting them twitching on their tethers.

Hasina tried again to lift her face. Her head was throbbing. She should just die here. Coming back to life was too hard, too painful.

‘We came to see you,’ Sima said. She reached in to Hasina and tried to wipe off her filthy face with her scarf. ‘To say hello.’

Hasina couldn’t speak. She let the girls prod her into a sitting position, rested her back against the cot. She looked sightlessly at the dead legs stretched out in front of her, worn out with running.

Sima tried to bend herself into Hasina’s vision. ‘Hasina Auntie,’ she said, ‘shall I fetch Mother?’

Hasina shook her head. May God protect her from that foolish woman. Sima disappeared. Hasina could feel the warm shape of Nadira cuddled beside her. She was still patting Hasina, now on the thigh.

Sima reappeared with a cup of water. ‘Drink this,’ she said. She pushed it into Hasina’s hands. ‘Water is very good for health. You’ll feel much better.’

She took the water and drank. It was cool and pure in her dirty mouth. I might get better, she thought suddenly. What if I were to survive and carry on without him? What an insult that would be. She fell to weeping again, her hands to her face. The small arms of the girls hung on her wherever they could find purchase.

The children stayed with her all afternoon. They crouched beside her, gazing at her with anxious eyes, until she finally stopped crying. Then, as she sat there, worn and indifferent, they started to prattle.

‘I like your house,’ Sima said. ‘It’s quiet.’ She pulled Nadira to her feet, took both her hands and started to turn with her. ‘There’s always someone shouting in ours. It’s too noisy.’

Hasina let her chin fall to her chest. It will always be quiet here now. It is a dead house.

The girls started to spin, bumping into the cots. They fell in a heap, giggling. Hasina watched them dully.

‘Will you tell us more?’ Sima said. She rolled onto her stomach and kicked up her legs behind her. ‘Your story. About the village and the children.’

‘Please, Hasina Auntie!’ Yousaf had appeared in the doorway. ‘No one tells us stories except you.’

Hasina, looking at him, thought of Aref. Aref’s face when he was a boy. The long lashes that veiled his eyes, the softness of his skin, his milky smell. She turned her face away from them. ‘There is no more story,’ she said.

Late in the afternoon, she took the children home. She heard Palwasha scold them as they went into the house, the slap of a hand on bare skin. Where had they been? Thoughtless creatures.

Hasina sank to the ground, there in the compound yard, her legs too weak to bear her. When Palwasha came out with strong sweet tea, Hasina left it sitting beside her in the dirt, steaming, until it was cold and wasted.

Finally Karam came out. He crouched beside her and put his hand on her shoulder.

‘I salute you,’ he said in a low voice, ‘precious mother of a martyr. May Allah bless you.’

Hasina didn’t look at him.

‘You shouldn’t have seen it,’ he said. ‘That was wrong.’ He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face. ‘You must keep this secret.’

She stared at him. What could he be thinking? How could she possibly…?

‘Remember the gossip in the village after the death of Masoud’s son.’ Karam’s eyes were stern. ‘He was a martyr.’ He paused. ‘But not everyone understood.’

Hasina did remember. People said the boy brought danger to the village. No one wanted their own sons to copy him.

Karam took her arm, pulled her roughly to her feet. For a moment, she thought her legs would falter. But Karam’s hand was gripping her, keeping her upright. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Say nothing.’

She stared, bewildered. How could she bear this loss in silence, alone, without the comfort of her husband? How was that possible? ‘But Abdul—’

‘I will tell him the boy has gone away. To Kandahar. For now, you must say nothing.’

He was propelling Hasina forward towards the gate. His grip cut into her flesh.

‘Abdul trusts me,’ he said. He turned her to face the compound gate, to leave. ‘You must trust me too.’ He opened the gate and half guided, half pushed her through into the road. ‘You should be joyful,’ he said. ‘Alhamdulillah. Thanks be to Allah.’

4

Two days after the market bombing, Hasina dreamt of Aref and woke, wondering. It was late in the night. In the yard, the stars were strong, the moon almost fully grown. The shapes of the land shone in the half-light. The stones, the ditches, the corn, high as a man. The rich, earthy scent of it. Their home. Their land.

She went to sit on the large flat stone at the top of the fields. The mud was cold under her feet. She drew her shawl round her shoulders. The first chill of autumn. She tried to calm herself, leaning her mind into the scream of insects in the undergrowth at her feet.

The foreign soldiers were coming. Everyone said so. Where would she and Abdul go, if they were driven off their land? She shuddered. Impossible, she thought, that Allah, who had given them this land, this blessing on His people, would force them to leave it.

She closed her eyes. Images swarmed into her head, dancing and weaving. Aref’s presence. She could feel him. The warm scent of his body, first as a small boy, then as an awkward young man. This is my grief, she told herself. Grief is making his ghost rise and come back to me. She reached out her hands, imagining her fingertips on his skin.

A stick cracked in the corn. She kept still. Better to keep the dream, she thought, and be slaughtered where I sit, than to lose my Aref, my boy, a second time. The rustle in the corn grew louder, closer. Finally, she opened her eyes.

The air was silvery with moonlight. The noise was in the field, just a few metres from her. An animal, perhaps. Or the slow stealth of a person. Was that a low dark shape, crouching? She crept forward to peer into the corn.

His ghost was haunting her. She blinked. How fat he was, his stomach rounded. Then she made out the rags tied round his middle, stained with patches of black. When he raised his eyes, his face was pallid. The face of the dead. She stretched out her arms.

‘Aref?’

He lifted himself to his hands and knees and crawled towards her.

‘My Aref?’

He collapsed half at her feet, half across her knee. She buried her face in his neck, inhaling him. She patted him with fluttering hands, her fingers working him as if they were kneading bread. She took possession again of each hollow, each joint, each rib, each knob of spine, relearning his body for herself, the way she’d first learned it when he was put into her arms as a new baby, all those years before. He was moaning quietly. When her hands reached his face, her fingers were black and wet with blood. In stroking him, she smeared his cheeks, his chin.

She rocked him hard, encircling him with her arms to keep him safe. He lay, limp, and surrendered to her.

She expected the dream to end. When her arms began to ache, she pulled back her face to look. His forehead and cheeks were moist with sweat, his skin chilled. She lifted her fists and pummelled him in the chest.

‘How could you?’ she heard herself saying. His body was jumping, jolted by her hammering fists. ‘How could you leave me?’

He raised his arms and groped for her wrists. His grasp was weak. Her anger dissolved into weeping.

‘Aref,’ she moaned. ‘You precious fool.’

‘I need to hide,’ he whispered. ‘Just until I’m strong again.’

Hasina half dragged, half walked him along the ridge at the top of the fields, away from the village. Along the outer edge of their land, Abdul had dug an irrigation channel for flash floods. Now it was dry. She searched for the most hidden stretch and cleared away the stones there. Aref lay on his back in the channel, his eyes glazed. The earth sides were smooth and steep, as if he lay already in his grave.